Free Republic

WASHINGTON --- President Obama has been rolling out the red carpet at the White House during his first term -- playing host to a who's who of business-world bigs and A-list celebs including George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, newly released records reveal. Also among the Tinseltown drop-ins were megastars Brad Pitt and Denzel Washington, who paid a visit in May, according to visitors logs, which cover January to July. The administration posted the records on its Web site yesterday, two days after a report revealed that some of Obama's top financial backers had gotten White House tours and even use...

Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country's national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday. According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection. Just more than a year ago, Finland said it would make a 100Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday's announcement is considered an intermediate step. France,...

BAGHDAD — Maya road, the major access road just outside the Victory Base Complex (VBC) here, opened to traffic, Aug 1. For the past three months, the formerly pothole-plagued dirt path underwent a complete overhaul. It is now a smooth concrete means of travel for both military and Iraqi civilian traffic. One of the greatest achievements of this construction project is that it will now reduce the footprint of Coalition forces in line with the June 30 Security Agreement. "It is not only an easier means of travel, it also keeps military traffic out of the cities," said Capt. Steven...

McLEAN, Va. - The Bureau of Prisons says it reversed course months ago to allow some of the country's most dangerous prisoners to read two books written by President Barack Obama. Court papers filed Thursday show that prison officials twice rejected requests by inmate Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to read "Dreams from my Father" and "The Audacity of Hope."

A Letter to Our Readers By Katharine Weymouth Sunday, July 5, 2009 Dear Reader: I want to apologize for a planned new venture that went off track and for any cause we may have given you to doubt our independence and integrity. A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home. The flier was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not accurately reflect what we had in mind. But let me be clear: The flier was not the only...

I want to apologize for a planned new venture that went off track and for any cause we may have given you to doubt our independence and integrity. A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home. The flier was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not accurately reflect what we had in mind. But let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem. Our mistake was to suggest that we would hold and participate in an...

Post publisher apologizes for paid dinner plan Washington Post publisher apologizes for plan to hold paid dinners with officials, journalists On Sunday July 5, 2009, 6:59 am EDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Washington Post's publisher apologized to readers Sunday for a plan to charge business leaders and lobbyists for intimate dinner discussions with government officials and the newspaper's journalists. A flier surfaced last week promoting a plan to charge $25,000 to sponsor one of a series of dinner parties that would include off-the-record conversations with Post journalists and access to Washington insiders. The series was canceled Thursday.

Katharine Weymouth, the relatively new publisher of The Washington Post, is a lawyer who worked for the company for 12 years and was educated at the Harvard School of Business, so she is hardly a naïf in running a business. But she has never worked in a newsroom, a gap in her résumé that may have contributed to her current problems. As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home...

Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

Police from communities across the state have repeatedly tapped into the state's criminal records system to improperly access information on celebrities and "high-profile citizens," according to a scathing audit released yesterday that also branded the system as obsolete and flawed. Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times - seeking anything from his driver's license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun - and auditors discovered "repeated searches and queries" on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John...

Periodically, and both Wednesday and today I could not log on, basically all day until just now. But I checked and the FR site was up.I think the problem is simply that FR is busy and I, on dial-up, just can't get through before the connection times out. I get this error: But I want to make sure there is not something else going on, such as being blocked or something for some reason.Any comments you might have about access problems to FR, especially on dial-up, are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

The library board of trustees meeting was moved to a larger room to accommodate all those wanting to speak. The proposal, which came from a library patron, was to restrict the access by children to four books, Sex for Busy People, The Lesbian Kama Sutra, The Joy of Sex and The Joy of Gay Sex. "This is clearly an effort to suppress books about gay people. Only four books were targeted out of the thousands that might have been targeted, say, about tawdry romance novels or books about how to make a bomb or maybe a book about how to...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE GARDEZ, Afghanistan, Feb. 19, 2009 – The walls of the Paktia provincial hospital are a bleak, dirty, two-tone, painted gray along the lower half and lime-green to the ceiling. Charred electrical wires poke from the plastered walls, hot-wired with no caps, covers or even electrical tape binding them. One of the teachers at a midwife training center in Gardez City, Afghanistan, talks about what the class needs, Feb. 17, 2009. The teachers asked for more training aids and computers to run multimedia lessons. DoD photo by Fred W. Baker III  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

COLORADO SPRINGS) It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters’ questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama. In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions....

Several senior former Israeli defense officials have blasted a US Jewish organization linked to Barack Obama for distributing a short video in which they seemingly urge Americans to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Commissioned by the Jewish Council for Education & Research (JCER), which has made itself part of the Obama campaign, the video is titled "Israel's Generals Speak," and features some of the Jewish state's top military minds purportedly backing Obama's planned approach to the region. But on Monday, one of those generals, former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Uzi Dayan told Voice of Israel radio that he...

Below are a collection of articles about and by Rashida Tlaib, Obama's new Muslim outreach director. She is not fond of border security. She is on the board of a questionable organization... ############ http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2008/08/election_day_in.html “Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian Muslim extremist whose candidacy was touted across the country on extremist Muslim and anti-Israel mailing lists, is unfortunately a viable candidate for this seat,” posted Debbie Schlussel, a conservative blogger based in Michigan. Schlussel want on to say, “Tlaib was a top official at ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, the agency that gets millions in your tax...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Online forums where thousands of child-porn images have been posted have been stricken from three Internet providers, including two of the nation's five largest, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday. Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests. With the agreement announced Tuesday, Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the...

WASHINGTON – Twenty retired federal judges, two rear admirals and a Marine general joined 383 current or former members of the European and British parliaments on Friday in urging the Supreme Court to grant detainees at Guantanamo Bay full access to the U.S. court system. Lower court rulings supporting the Bush administration's opposition to full court access “were seized upon by repressive governments as a license to incarcerate their own citizens and others with impunity,” 25 retired American diplomats wrote in one court filing. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to take the detainees' case, reversing a decision in April...

WASHINGTON — Reporters will be barred from hearings that begin Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 14 terror suspects transferred last year from secret CIA prisons, officials said Tuesday. Interest in the 14 is particularly high because of their alleged links to the Al Qaeda network. Among them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. He was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. A New York-based human rights group that represents one of the 14 men accused the Pentagon of designing "sham tribunals." The organization contended that its client, Majid Khan,...

Richard Beardall is getting exactly what he wanted: a trespassing ticket from federal land managers for ignoring the rules and riding his ATV on a closed road in the San Rafael Swell. Beardall, three other ATV riders and a Jeep, moved a 10-foot barricade near an old uranium mine and made a half-mile roundtrip along the access road to the Muddy River on Saturday. The Bureau of Land Management closed the area to recreational vehicles in 1993 due to riparian damage, said Price, Utah-based BLM manager Roger Bankert. Beardall, president of the Americans with Disabilities Access Alliance knows that, but...

WASHINGTON - Republican activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed landed more than 100 meetings inside the Bush White House, according to documents released Wednesday that provide the first official accounting of the access and influence the two presidential allies have enjoyed. The White House released the Secret Service visit records to settle a lawsuit by the Democratic Party and an ethics watchdog group seeking visitors logs for the two GOP strategists and others who emerged as figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Earlier this month, the White House suggested to the judge in that lawsuit that such records need...

There is a debate going on about the ease of searching someones court records in Wisconsin. www.Wisconsin-Circuit-Court-Access.com even lists the Classification Codes to search the WCCA database for specific types of court case. Should there be restrictions limiting the use of this database?

More National Guard troops went to work Friday on the Arizona-Mexico border, all part of Operation: Jumpstart. Right now, there are about 750 troops working in Arizona. About 300 are from Arizona and another 150 are from New York. 200 just went to work Friday from Kentucky. News 4's Lupita Murillo was there, and shows us just how these fresh troops are helping the Border Patrol. -------------- We're just east of an area known as Smugglers Gulch and this is where members of the Kentucky National Guard are building a road. The 206th Engineer Battallion is clearing the way for...

Congressional travelers took all-expenses-paid trips worth almost $50 million over a 5½-year period, with corporations and other private sponsors picking up the tab, according to a report released yesterday. The report raises fresh questions about influence-peddling that began last year when lobbying and corruption scandals erupted on Capitol Hill. “This is really a form of unregulated lobbying that is done completely out of public view,” said Jim Morris of The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group in Washington D.C. Morris led the center's nine-month study of congressional travel disclosure forms, which was joined by Northwestern University's Medill News Service...

HONOLULU, May 10, 2006 – A Defense Department program that 64 other federal agencies have adopted sees to it that wounded servicemembers from Iraq and Afghanistan and other people with disabilities have equal access to the information environment and opportunities throughout the federal government, a senior DoD official said here May 8. The Defense Department and other government agencies have the challenges of bringing people with disabilities back to work, Dinah F.B. Cohen told the audience May 8 during DoD''s Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month observance in Honolulu. Photo by Rudi Williams  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Dinah F.B....

WASHINGTON, May 4, 2006 – In an effort to give Iraqi scientists access to academic knowledge they have long been without, the Iraqi Virtual Science Library was publicly launched here yesterday. "This knowledge is essential to the rebuilding of Iraq's scientific and university communities, which were devastated by three wars and the regime of Saddam Hussein," Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for global affairs, said at the National Academy of Sciences. The online library will provide Iraqi scientists, engineers, physicians, researchers, and students the ability to access more than 17,000 academic journals and millions of scientific articles. The free...

WASHINGTON -- Lacking assurances from Russia and China that they would approve UN sanctions, the U.S. administration is trying to deny Iran technology, assets and especially weapons to slow down a suspected nuclear weapons program. As part of that campaign, a top U.S. State Department official on Friday urged Russia to drop its plan to sell Tor anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. "We hope and we trust that the deal will not go forward because this is not the time for business as usual with the Iranian government," said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who has been trying to line up...

WASHINGTON - Not long after columnist Jack Anderson's funeral, FBI agents called his widow to say they wanted to search his papers. They were looking for confidential government information he might have acquired in a half-century of investigative reporting. The agents expressed interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who have been charged with disclosing classified information, said Kevin Anderson, the columnist's son. In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive — which has yet to be catalogued...

October 7, 2003 was a bad day for Darius Anderson. A top fundraiser for Gray Davis, Anderson had counted ranking Davis administration officials, including then-deputy chief of staff Susan Kennedy, as friends. He founded his own lobbying firm in 1998, parlaying his connections to the administration into a thriving business. By 2003, Davis' last year in office, Anderson's Platinum Advisors pulled in $3.9 million in lobbying receipts, good for third best in the state. But when Davis was recalled in 2003, Anderson's influence diminished. His shop's lobbying receipts declined by more than $1 million as big name clients like Microsoft,...

Google Inc. is offering a new tool that will automatically transfer information from one personal computer to another. Anyone wanting that convenience, however, must authorize the Internet search leader to store the material for up to 30 days. That compromise, sought as part of a free software upgrade released Thursday, might be more difficult to swallow now that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is demanding to know what kind of information people have been hunting through Google's search engine. Google is fighting the Justice Department's subpoena in a federal court battle that's focusing more attention on the...

ast week Google announced its intention to resist a Department of Justice court action underway. DOJ wanted Google to allow a surveillance test of millions of its users’ search queries as part of its effort to enforce online pornography legislation passed by Congress to protect children. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN had already agreed to cooperate. But now, in an extraordinary development, Google has announced its decision to join the largest internet censorship effort in the world, being run by Communist China. Google will actively assist the Chinese government in barring access to thousands of web sites and search terms, in...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 29, 2005 Conservation Groups File Lawsuit to Protect National Parks From Harmful Off-Road Vehicle Use: Survey of Parks Reveals Extensive Damage from Off-Road Vehicles, Lack of Funding for Enforcement WASHINGTON, D.C. - Bluewater Network, a division of Friends of the Earth; the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA); and Wildlands CPR today filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service and theDepartment of Interior in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleging that those agencies have failed in numerous ways to protect the National Park System against the extensive damage caused by all-terrain vehicles and other off-road...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17, 2005 – A case concerning colleges' right to receive federal funding but bar military recruiters from campuses because of disagreements over homosexual policy is scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court this session. The 1996 "Solomon Amendment" provides for the government to deny federal funding to institutions of higher learning if they prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus. In December, the court will hear a case arguing that the law impinges on the free speech rights of colleges and law schools. "The Solomon Amendment establishes that for military recruiting, which is an important public function,...

CNN filed suit for right to cover search for bodies of Katrina victims HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans. Joint Task Force Katrina "has no plans to bar, impede or prevent news media from their news gathering and reporting activities in connection with the deceased Hurricane Katrina victim recovery efforts," said Col. Christian E. deGraff, representing the task force. U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a...

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has attacked violent video games as "a silent epidemic" among children, said she wants a federal investigation into one of the most popular, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." Clinton, D-N.Y., is asking the Federal Trade Commission to probe how users of the game can access "graphic pornographic and violent content" for the game from the Internet. In a letter dated Thursday to FTC chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras, she also urged the agency to examine whether the game's rating of "M" for mature should be changed to an "Adults Only" rating. The Entertainment Software...

I haven't bee able to open www.NewsMax.com's website for several weeks. Does anyone know why?

Will the Real News Fabricator Please Stand Up? May 19, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel The Detroit News and its star reporter, David Shepardson, got caught with their pants down. They ran a fake story. But no-one noticed. No-one, except me—which lead to Detroit News Editor and Publisher Mark Silverman and his minions racing to hush the story and bury it, looking for some silent way to cover-up their very large, very exposed rears. They printed Shepardson’s phony story about a terrorist, and I exposed it, last week. Shepardson ran with it, without even a modicum of fact-checking (easily done with...

Protect Your Access to Health Information: Contact Your Congressman Today On May 12, 2005, Congressman Ron Paul (14th District -- Texas) introduced the Consumers Access to Health Information Act (Bill 2352). The purpose of the bill is to ensure that "consumers can receive truthful information about how foods and dietary supplements can cure, mitigate, and prevent specific diseases." Simply put, this bill will restore consumer access to information about the benefits of nutritional supplements, a right guaranteed under the First Amendment. Why Do We Need This Legislation? We need this legislation because the FDA has been trampling on our constitutional...

IMPORTANT: Please note that the previous signatures have been voided for your protection. Do not re-sign this petition. Each day I will remove all of the signatures so only I have access to them. Please do not feel uncomfortable to put your name, email, address, and tel. number on this petition. It is secure. If you know of people who have not signed this petition due to fear of their information being public, inform them of this. Thank you. I ask for all information for this petition (name, address, and tel. number) for validation purposes only. It will not be...

A short and sweet question - does anyone know of a printable web page that lists SQLCODES and the explanation? I tried searching IBM's libraries, but maybe I am looking at the wrong pages.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. (AP) -- Viewers expecting to see the latest local meeting on their public access channel got an eyeful recently when Cablevision played a tape of nude dancers accidentally. The mistake affected customers in parts of Dutchess, Ulster, Putnam and Orange counties. Hopewell Junction resident George Morton returned home from Palm Sunday Mass and turned on his television to see a striptease contest. "I thought, this is terrible," Morton said. "I don't get HBO or anything like that." Cablevision said Thursday it was not a public access program and that a "program switching error" occurred. "When it was detected,...

Thumbs Down: Roger Ebert Helps A Terrorist March 26, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel Normally, it would be unfair to attack Roger Ebert for his addiction to food. Normally, it would be in poor taste to hold the calorically-gifted film-critic’s insatiable taste-buds against him. Normally. But now, Roger Ebert’s irresistible yen for a sandwich is literally his excuse to defend an Islamic terrorist, Ibrahim Parlak. Parlak, who is under deportation orders, owns a restaurant in Harbert, Michigan—a restaurant Ebert frequents, with apparently great appetite. In a letter to the U.S. government opposing Parlak’s deportation, Ebert wrote, “[H]e offered to come to...

Texas is the only state that prohibits voters who participate in a political party's primary election or a local party convention from signing ballot access petitions for political parties or independent candidates for office. Since 1972, the six other states that had a similar provision have dropped it. Now, the Libertarian Party of Texas is working with state legislators to get a bill passed to eliminate this facet of election law, which is called "primary screenout." On Feb. 28, State Representative Todd Baxter, a Republican, filed the bill (HB 1721) for consideration by the state House's Elections Committee after Libertarians...

Activists taking shots at the planned Trans Texas Corridor have found some legislators willing to take a stab at trimming the colossal super-highway and ensuring that state authorities control the toll rates. Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who sits on the appropriations committee and is vice chairman of the House Rural Caucus, said she filed House Bill 1273 in an attempt to balance the huge scope of the corridor with grass-root concerns. "My goal is to better the concept," she said. "I will be very saddened for Texas if we don't have some assurances in place." Kolkhorst was joined by co-authors...

We're in the midst of a technology-driven transformation of the meaning of the word "morality" that would have been impossible to foretell even a quarter century ago. The virtually instantaneous availability of — to cite only one example — pornographic material of every imaginable (and some unimaginable) variety to anyone with high-speed internet capability veritably defies our society's ability to manage it. Whether we're considering the sheer rapidity with which enhancements to the technologies that facilitate such access occur, or the economic inducements to (in this case) porn principals, particularly producers and female stars, to continue to pursue their chosen...

Texas Department of Transportation officials sought to allay the fears of a skeptical McLennan County Commissioners Court on Tuesday regarding the Trans-Texas Corridor and the potential for a new tollway running through the county. Highway officials said they will continue to seek input from the public and local governments as the massive project's design takes shape. They also said they're committed to pushing forward on the corridor based on the need to alleviate traffic congestion on Interstate Highway 35. "The congestion, we think, on 35 is reaching critical mass," said Phillip Russell, director of the transportation department's turnpike division. "We...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to ban off-road vehicles across more than a half-million acres in Southern California to protect the desert tortoise. The injunction, issued last week by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, was praised by environmentalists who said it sent a message to the Bush administration and public land agencies that wildlife habitat must be protected. The ban affects portions of two large desert wildlife areas in Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties. The land is marked with washes popular with off-roaders but considered by environmentalists critical...

The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert Speaker of the House of Representatives Room H-232 United States Capitol Washington, DC 20515 Dear Speaker Hastert: On behalf of the 350,000 members of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), I write to urge you to enact S. 150, the Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect taxpayers from Internet access charges. While NTU would have preferred this legislation also block taxation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), if the votes are not there to enact both types of safeguards right now, taxpayers at a minimum need immediate protection from money-hungry state legislators seeking to add...

New York - A cable pay-per-view company has decided not to show a three-hour election eve special with filmmaker Michael Moore that included a showing of his documentary ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' which is sharply critical of President Bush. The company, iN DEMAND, said Friday that its decision is due to ``legitimate business and legal concerns.'' A spokesman would not elaborate. Moore has just released his movie on DVD and was seeking a TV outlet for the film. Earlier this week, trade publications said Moore was close to a deal with iN DEMAND for ``The Michael Moore Pre-Election Special,'' which also would...

Watching ABC, CBS, or NBC news, you would never know that Iranian civilians are now being killed while protesting against their country’s Islamist dictators. You probably wouldn’t know that Iran is considered to be the “world's ‘most active state sponsor of terrorism.’” You most surely haven’t heard that between 10,000 and 15,000 Iranians risk life and liberty to run web logs (“blogs”) opposing their government. Maybe you’ve heard that Iran’s rulers are secretly building nuclear weapons, but did you know that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have sold nuclear technologies to Iran? Have you heard that Iran now has ballistic...